


Miles to Go

by GuileandGall



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Angst, Comfort/Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Jardaan, Maps, post-Meridian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 20:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17474786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuileandGall/pseuds/GuileandGall
Summary: Odd dreams are nothing new to the Pathfinder, at least not since she nearly died, got an AI wired into her brain, and actually died (a few times). But that doesn’t mean they don’t make for sleepless nights.





	Miles to Go

**Author's Note:**

> SeoKanori’s art captures the scale of the story in Andromeda while also placing a face on it. And her statement that she hoped her work would inspire writers beyond the moment captured really helped me find my way to writing this piece. Also thanks (hugs & kisses) to the folks who took a peek at this and made edits and comments: AlyssAlenko & VorchaGirl. You ladies are awesome.

****

**-1-**

The reverberating song of the wavering shaft of light sounded musical in a strange mechanical sense. The light from the pyramid outlet like strands of something solid.

“So, that’s it?” Drack asked in his grizzled gravelly voice. His heavy footsteps added an uneven base note to the song. “That’s what changed it all?”

“You’ve seen this before, old man,” Vetra chided. Her voice reverberating with chiding glee.

A low grumble rumbled from the ancient krogan’s thick chest. For the Pathfinder and others on the crew of the _Tempest_ , the sound came to bring more comfort than concern. Drack adopted them all in one way or another and managed to consistently always have their backs.

Sara Ryder said nothing. She just inched forward, eyes narrowing at the strands in the light with each step. “There’s something there,” she mumbled, more to herself than anyone else.

Neither of them replied to her, instead they continued their good-natured ribbing of one another. The Pathfinder moved forward with care as she slowly slid the pistol from its holster. The hairs on the back of her neck rose due to the electricity that seemed to permeate the air in the Jardaan planetary core facilities.

Beneath the technological opera of life written by the natives of Heleus, Sara thought she could hear something else. A voice. One that shouldn’t be there.

Her brow drew tighter over her bright eyes. The pistol rose. Squinting, she tried to focus on the shadows in the beam.

“I could swear,” she muttered. She couldn’t get a bead on the movement, and as much as she tried to hear it, the whispers remained incoherent and at the edge of her hearing.

Her feet carried her ever forward at a measured, methodical pace. With each darting movement, her aim followed. The whispers seemed to swirl around her now.

“Sara,” a voice would brush against her ear. The pistol drawing down where a speaker should have been but wasn’t. Another call and her focuses would shift once more. Finally, she stood right at the edge of the beam, the blue-white light of it filling her field of vision. Lowering her weapon, she inched closer, finally reaching out. Something grabbed her and pulled her into it, but she did not fall. She hung there, suspended in the beam.

“There is no time to waste. Home awaits.”

It was her father’s voice, clear and unmistakable, bearing the same seriousness of command that she remembered from all those lectures as a girl. In the next moment, whatever had suspended her there snapped and she plummeted into the unknown.

 

**-2-**

Sara startled awake. Eyes darting around her, her breathing slowed as the familiar surroundings of her quarters became clearer in the darkness. She leaned back onto her pillows once more and a warm hand snaked around her waist, pulling her closer. A contented smile pulled at her lips and the embrace helped to reorient her further. Her indigo eyes studied the face of the person sharing her bed; her fingertips brushed the stubble on his jawline.

A low growl rumbled from inside his throat as he shook his head. Her smile widened and she pulled her hand back. _No need to wake him, too_ , she thought as she watched the sleeping doctor. He had a mountain of stress of his own.

Her mind wandered back to the dream. That voice. Though it was the message more so than the appearance of the ominous specter which stuck in her head.

_There is no time to waste. Home awaits._

He’d said that to her and Scott when they were waiting for the shuttle to take them to the Hyperion back in the Milky Way. It echoed through her mind, even as she tried to convince herself back to sleep. Anytime her eyes actually closed, her father’s voice came to her again out of the darkness.

_There is no time to waste. Home awaits._

With a sigh, she stared at the ceiling. Clearly, her subconscious needed her to refocus. She looked beside her once more unto the peaceful face of her lover sleeping beside her. She envied him that kind of slumber. Since arriving in Andromeda most of her rest came in quick catnaps here and there; it seemed even with him lying beside her, the pattern of poor sleep would continue.

_Sleep well, Harry._ Blowing him a kiss, she slipped her body from beneath the sheets and slithered out of bed. With a huge yawn, Sara stretched her hands above her head as she padded across the room and tapped on the console in the center of the room. A projected image filled the space of her quarters, casting a muted glow on the room as the map from the Eos vault hung in the air around her. Sara hadn’t bothered to open it since finding Aya—her focus landing on the frantic set of tasks and emergencies that set them on the chase to this place, to Meridian.

The map, whether SAM’s doing or its own, now showed multiple green worlds, as Aya had appeared on Eos. The Pathfinder could only assume that those changed worlds were the ones where she’d activated the dormant vaults. There were still so many others, she thought. Other points of light suggesting that there were more.

“SAM,” she whispered on an exhale as she sat down on the floor beneath the image. Her voice only barely broke the silence around her. “Have you mapped out these other locations?”

“Yes, Pathfinder.” The voice echoed in her head.

“Have we scouted any of them?”

“Only a handful, including H-047C.”

Ryder nodded. That rock had been intended as the new turian homeworld but had been destroyed by some planetary event. She sighed. There was still more work to be done, and another arc to find. The distress call hung in her mind.

The race to Meridian refocused most of them, she realized. They’d been detoured by the Archon and his incessant search, his insistent attempts at genocide. It was hard not to hear the whispers on the Nexus and not agree with them. The behavior of the kett—uplifting species, manipulating them for their own goals—it all felt very salarian. It was a sentiment that worried her, a connection that troubled her. Those kinds of thoughts shouldn’t have a place in Andromeda, but because of people like Tann, they did. Old prejudices, she knew, had been carried to a new galaxy, and as she looked up at this map that contained so much hope and possibility, she could not help but wonder if those archaic ideas and inequalities would lead them down similar paths once more.

“Can you locate them?” she asked on another quiet exhale as she stood once more.

“Using current mapping I can extrapolate the most likely locations of the remaining points.”

“Do it, SAM,” she thought. She moved through the projection, stopping at one world off on it’s own. Her hand rose and cradled it as it spun slowly. Her mother’s voice whispered at the edge of her mind, an old memory tied to their shared love of poetry. A smile crept across Sara’s face with the recollection of Frost’s poem:

_Whose woods these are I think I know._

_His house is in the village thought;_

_He will not see me stopping here_

_To watch his woods fill up with snow._

 

_My little horse must think it queer_

_To stop without a farmhouse near_

_Between the woods and frozen lake_

_The darkest evening of the year._

 

_He gives his harness bells a shake_

_To ask if there is some mistake._

_The only other sound_ _’s the sweep_

_Of easy wind and downy flake._

 

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep,_

_But I have promises to keep,_

_And miles to go before I sleep,_

_And miles to go before I sleep._

“The locations have been plotted, but the plotted the position of some of these worlds do not match our own or the Angaran star maps,” the AI voice in her head stated. “Though in one case there is an asteroid belt along the path of the planet. It is likely that it experienced a catastrophic event.”

“Like the Kett?” she wondered aloud.

“It is possible. Though judging from the pattern of the debris field it is more likely a natural event. Perhaps collision with a comet or even another planetary body.”

SAM always kept her mind grounded in science. Sara appreciated that, though there were times when she just wanted to be angry and blame the Kett for the mayhem surrounding them.  “Indeed. Can you shade those missing worlds, please SAM?”

“Certainly, Sara.”

She nodded, her smile pulling wide once more. Long ago, she found she preferred it when SAM called her by her first name, rather than the rank that her father had passed onto her in his dying moments.

_There is no time to waste. Home awaits._ The words traipsed through her head in her father’s voice. It was quickly followed by her mother’s melodic tone: _And miles to go before I sleep._

Ryder huffed a silent laugh, tainted with a hint of bitterness. They were right, and like a teenager, she hated admitting it. The pathfinder sighed, drawing her hand back from the world spinning off on its own. “And miles to go before I sleep,” she agreed with them.

Intending to study the more populated portion of the map, she turned and discovered Harry on his feet at the edge of the display.

“Sara.”

“Did I wake you?” she asked, crossing through the points of light in the display without care of disturbing them.

“No.”

She knew that she had, even if he didn’t realize it or wouldn’t admit it. Perhaps it was her absence, or the low glow from the map, or her mumbling and wandering, but she knew it, she was the reason he was not still sleeping. “Mmhmm,” she hummed, the sound carrying a touch of accusation in it.

“What is all this?” he asked, reaching for her when she moved within arm’s length.

Sara didn’t take her eyes off him. She knew the map well. It had haunted her waking and sleeping for months after establishing that initial settlement. “We discovered it in that first vault. The one on Eos. It is what led us to Aya.”

One warm hand clutched her waist, while both of hers traced the shape of his broad, bare, shoulders. “And these are all vaults?”

“That’s the working theory,” Sara said. Her hands clasped behind his neck as she stared up at him. His keen eyes still moved over the map beyond her, though at least half his attention was hers. As his arms encircled her, his fingers sneaked beneath the hem of the tank top she wore to bed and tickled along the curve of her spine. She didn’t know why, but it was always something he did. From just resting his hand on the small of her back to more intimate touches and soft kisses, he always touched her there. And Sara found great comfort in it, in that tender trace of their intimacy.

“There’s dozens of them.”

Ryder peeked over her shoulder. “I know.” She concentrated on her breath, lowering her gaze to follow her fingertips as they traced along his collarbone to the divot in his neck. “And we’ve only found a handful of them. Some of them are gone.”

“Like the turian homeworld?”

“Yes. And others.” She took the hint and slipped out of his embrace, but took hold of one of this hands and brought him along as she moved through the projected image to one of the planets that Sam had shaded red. “SAM and I were talking about this one. It’s located along the path of an asteroid belt, so clearly, something’s happened to it.”

Harry hummed in agreement.

“We don’t know what, and SAM tends to remind me that there are more likely scenarios in the cluster than the Kett being at fault for everything.”

The doctor chuckled. It was a comforting sound that warmed her heart and eased her soul.  “He’s right. Though from everything the Initiative has seen and experienced since arriving in Andromeda, I can understand the leap.”

Heat radiated off his skin, passing through the thin material of her undershirt as his bare chest came to rest against her back. Sara pulled his arm around her waist, encouraging him wordlessly to hold her. He did; he read the signs in her body, embracing her and curving his tall frame around her.

“Guess that explains the poem,” he sighed.

She shifted and blinked up at him as his gaze met hers.

“Miles to go before I sleep,” he clarified.

“Indeed,” she agreed with the same hint of sadness she thought she heard in his tone. “Is something wrong, Harry?”

Silence pulsed between them until he answered. “No.” He pressed a kiss to her temple, a simple, yet loving, hint of reassurance. “No, I just thought maybe with the discovery of Meridian and the death of the Archon—”

Sara felt certain she might know exactly what he was thinking. She leaned more heavily against his firm chest with a sigh. “I want that,” she admitted, assuming his meaning. “I want this.” She turned in his arms. “You,” she added, stroking his cheek.

“I knew the mission. Should have known your work wasn’t done.”

When his embrace started to loosen, her grip on him tightened. “Harry.”

“You’re still living on this ship, for heaven’s sake.” Shaking his head, the doctor managed to slip through her fingers, pacing back into the shadows at the edge of the map.

She’d been offered ‘homes’ on Eos and Kadara, even an apartment on the Nexus. She never took any of them. They didn’t feel right, didn’t give her that feeling she remembered from her childhood. That sensation of walking into a place and knowing it was your own, knowing it was the place you were meant to be.

“You’re right,” she agreed. That feeling only came to her rarely in Andromeda, when she was on this ship and … Sara closed the distance between them. “Because it’s the only other place I feel like I’m meant to be,” she said as she slipped her arms around his waist.

His gaze fell on her face, studying her features. “Other?” he asked.

She was certain he knew her meaning; he had to know how much he’d come to mean to her. “I love you, Harry. For me, home can only ever be where you are. And, right now, the only place I know we can always have a space for us is on this ship.”

He didn’t reply immediately. His fingers brushed her cheek and she turned her head into his touch. “Sara,” he breathed. Her eyes opened again and focused on his face. “I hadn’t looked at it that way. You know I love you.”

“I do.”

He smiled at her, one of those sappy, yet knowing kinds of smiles—the kind a person cannot help but return.

“That’s why I have to keep searching. I have to find these other worlds. Find the Quarian ark. I can’t walk away from this responsibility.”

Harry sighed. “I know it.” He rested his forehead against hers, eyes closing, but still holding her close. “Can the search wait a few more days?” he asked, green eyes meeting hers once more.

“Doctor’s orders?” she asked, her tone taking on a cheekiness.

Harry’s smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Absolutely. Everyone deserves a little R&R.”

“Guess that settles it then.”

His arms wrapped around her waist and lifted her off her feet. Sara draped her arms around his shoulders and her legs around her hips. She placed tender, lingering kisses on his lips as she let him carry her back to bed. A few more days of home would do them both good.

_Miles to go_ , she thought as she pulled Harry down onto the bed with her.


End file.
